How to Be a Great Sales Enablement Manager

We've mentioned these stats in other blogs, but they bear repeating. Nearly 80% of American consumers say that friendly service, speed, knowledgeable help, and convenience are the most important elements of a positive customer experience. Yet, even if your customers love your company or product, 59% say they will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience. So the stakes are high for every business relying on a sales team to keep clients happy and revenue strong. 

As your company's sales manager, what can you do to ensure your sales team does all they can to provide a positive customer experience every single time? The answer is clear: sales enablement.

The concept of sales enablement has recently seen a 343% increase in adoption over the last five years. Why? Because 76% of companies using sales enablement strategies have seen their sales increase between 6% to 20%.

We'll discuss in this blog exactly what sales enablement is and what strategies you can implement to improve your customers' sales experience and increase sales revenue. We will also talk about tools available like Calldrip to assist your sales team by providing conversational sales strategies that are part of the sales enablement process.

What is Sales Enablement?

According to Hubspot, sales enablement is the "iterative process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information created or collected to effectively sell your product or service to customers." It seems obvious, doesn't it? But you'd be surprised to learn how many companies don't think through their sales process or their buyer's journey and create materials that support their sales team or help their customers make a buyer's decision. 

To put a fine point on it, companies with a sales enablement strategy are 52% more likely to have a closely aligned sales process and buyer's journey.

Sales enablement is about improving your sales team's performance. In short, the critical goals of sales enablement are to:

• Empower your sales team to close deals
• Prioritize your sales team's efficiency and efficacy

Here are 5 Tips for How to Be a Great Sales Enablement Manager

As the sales manager, you're the person your team leans on to provide the guidance and strategy to improve sales. Embracing sales enablement makes you a better manager and your team better salespeople.

1. Embrace Sales Coaching as the Heart of Sales Enablement

At the heart of this strategy is sales coaching, which is critical to your team's success. Just as an athlete credits their coach for a well-deserved win, your sales team can point to you as their manager for at least some of the reasons for their successes or failures. Studies show successful coaching can improve conversion rates by as much as 29%, and companies that focus on coaching can expect a massive 353% return on their investment.

You must include sales coaching in your sales enablement strategy to ensure success.

Calldrip's award-winning sales call coaching software assists your team in achieving top sales with tools that include customized KPIs, coaching scorecards, and purpose-built playbooks. The scorecards measure your team's performance based on conversational sales strategies and will identify coaching opportunities for your team. Calldrip will allow your team to take improvement into their own hands by providing feedback from their sales conversations and based on their own sales goals. When your sales team succeeds, your company succeeds. 

As a sales manager, you are the voice of sales enablement at your company. However, you should not be alone in developing your sales enablement approach. Sales enablement will only succeed if sales and marketing work together.  

2. Build Sales Enablement Around Your Customers

To do this, you’ll need to create a map of the buyer's journey. Your sales enablement strategies will not be viable unless you fully understand your ideal customer. All strategies must start there. 

Each customer experiences key moments in their interactions with your sales team that either make or break the sale. Don't assume you know what these moments are. Connect with your customers to discover them. Note the actions that might be taken by both your sales team and your customers at each point along the journey. 

As you build the map, note those interactions where you should supply external marketing resources to the buyer and/or internal sales resources to your sales team. As you build the map, check in with your sales team to make sure you've covered as many possible scenarios as you can.

3. Recognize that Sales Enablement is a Partnership

Your marketing team “owns” your company's brand message and voice. They will provide your sales team with the resources they need to sell effectively. These resources and materials will depend on your customer's needs and wants but often include videos, blogs, sales scripts, and product guides.

Of course, your sales team should communicate with marketing about which types of content and materials customers are asking for or what they have used that was successful in the past. This way, your teams work together to reach more customers and sell more effectively.

Sales and marketing teams need to be in sync; if you don’t make it clear that a strong relationship adds value to each team, you risk the efficacy of both teams. Research shows that alignment between sales and marketing teams can help your company become 67% better at closing deals and see 41% greater growth in reaching your quotas.

4. Emphasize the Importance of the Right Sales Resources

Create the internal and external tools that have been identified as needed for both the training program and your buyer's journey. You may want to ask your sales team if they've already created valuable tools they are using effectively and use those as your starting point. It may also help to prioritize the resources in terms of how important they are to the sales process so you can manage workloads.

Sales enablement resources typically fall into two buckets: the internal resources you provide to your sales team or the resources you design for your sales team to share externally with buyers.

Keep in mind that the resources you create should focus on your customer for sales enablement to succeed. Only by knowing your buyers inside and out can you and your team design a sales process that encourages conversion every step of the way.  Internal resources could include:

• Sales training tools
• Sales scripts and talking points
• KPIs to measure success 

Your sales training tools could contain:

• Brand messaging, voice, tone, and other brand mandatories
• Product specifications, features, benefits, and additional information
• A visual or physical depiction or map of your sales process from start to finish 
• An entire suite of sales enablement tools (or an all-in-one sales enablement software like Calldrip)

KPIs might include:

• Average days to closing
• Average sales amount
• Sales conversion rates
• Call analytics

Calldrip can help with call analytics in the salesperson call report, which includes KPIs like lead response times and connect rates.

External resources for buyers could include:

• Sales presentations
• Demonstration processes
• Printed sales leave-behinds
• Product brochures
• Product warranty information
• Other digital or printed company information

Try to ensure that your sales resources are easy to find and use! That’s essential for sales enablement content to be successful.

 Finally, review your existing resources to make sure they're all on-brand and sending the same message.

5. Leverage Automation as Part of Sales Enablement Execution

An essential aspect of successful sales enablement is automating everyday sales tasks. The more efficient your team is, the more successful they will be. For example, a large part of the sales journey is how and when your team follows up with lead inquiries. 

With sales software, email confirmations and follow-ups, automated call responses, and asking customers for sales reviews can be scheduled and sent at the best time and channel, leaving your sales team free to handle more critical in-person sales tasks. Calldrip can help with many of these automated tasks in our all-in-one conversational sales enablement solution.

You may want to explore automation technology like Calldrip's lead-to-call and lead-to-text response automation. Also, Calldrip makes it easy to automatically collect customer reviews via call and text and automatically publish them to Google, which will help with coaching and staying close to your customer's voice. Your conversational sales and sales enablement strategies will be even more effective with the support of a great sales automation software tool. 

Sales Enablement Is Your Ticket to Sales Success

It's a no-brainer. 55% of C-Suite executives think sales enablement solutions are the most necessary technology investment to boost sales. 

Calldrip's all-in-one sales enablement solution can support your team as you implement these sales enablement best practices. Claim your free demo, and let's get started.